PCAP-over-IP

PCAP-over-IP is a method for transmitting captured network traffic through a TCP connection.[1] The captured network traffic is transferred over TCP as a PCAP file in order to preserve relevant metadata about the packets, such as timestamps.

Background and etymology

The first known use of the term PCAP-over-IP is by Packet Forensics in 2011.[2] However, the concept behind PCAP-over-IP was mentioned already in 2008 as part of a feature request for Wireshark.[3] The need for this feature was motivated as follows:

"This feature is useful when the capture is generated on a machine which does not have much storage (e.g. embedded system). E.g., ipmb_traced application available on Pigeon Point shelf managers can transmit the capture over the TCP connection without writing it to the filesystem."

Use cases

Common use cases for PCAP-over-IP include:

  • Transmitting captured network traffic in real time to one or several remote machines
  • Transferring network traffic to other applications on the same host
  • Providing decrypted traffic from a TLS interception proxy to a packet analyzer or IDS.

Software with PCAP-over-IP support

Workarounds

Software that can sniff network traffic, but doesn't support PCAP-over-IP, can read packets from a PCAP-over-IP provider with help of a netcat and tcpreplay combo.

nc [SERVER] 57012 | tcpreplay -i eth0 -t -

References
  1. Hjelmvik, Erik. "What is PCAP over IP?". Netresec Blog. Netresec. Retrieved 25 August 2022.
  2. "Packet Forensics - M1 Device". Wayback Machine (FEB 06 2011). Retrieved 26 August 2022.
  3. Neyman, Alexey. "Bug 2788 - Allow captures over TCP connections". Wireshark Bug Database. Retrieved 25 August 2022.
  4. "Arkime Settings". Retrieved 25 August 2022.
  5. "Pcap-over-IP in NetworkMiner". Retrieved 25 August 2022.
  6. "PCAP-over-IP server written in Golang". GitHub. Retrieved 24 October 2023.
  7. "Pipes - TCP socket". Wireshark Wiki. Retrieved 25 August 2022.
  8. "PCAP-over-IP". Xplico Wiki. Retrieved 25 August 2022.
  9. "zeek-pcapovertcp-plugin". GitHub. Retrieved 6 September 2023.
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